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Congratulations: The rest of your 2008 paychecks belong to you and your family. Enjoy!

Oh, you didn’t hear?

The “mainstream” media probably didn’t tell you, but July 16 was this year’s “Cost of Government Day.” As Americans for Tax Reform notes, that’s the date on which the average American has paid his share of the financial burden imposed by the spending and regulation that occurs on the federal, state and local levels.

And just think: It only took you a little over half a year to do it.

I wish I could say things are improving on the government-cost front, but they’re not. This year’s date is four days later than it was in 2007 (July 12), and 17 days later than the “Cost of Government Day” notched as recently as 2000. In fact, COGD has fallen later than July 16 only four other times since 1977.

Something’s clearly out of whack. And we know what it is -- the free-spending ways of our elected officials in Washington. As Americans for Tax Reform notes in its report on Cost of Government Day, “The driving factor for this development is the fact that all components of the cost of government -- federal spending, state and local spending, and regulation -- are now increasing faster than national income.”

Unfortunately, the solution isn’t merely to get politicians to stop spending like teenagers equipped with their parents’ credit cards (although that would help). The fact is, the amount of money spent by Washington is already on track -- automatically, without politicians lifting a finger -- to go through the roof in the years ahead.

The reason? Our national entitlement programs are set to expand rapidly. According to researchers at The Heritage Foundation:

“These middle-class retirement programs, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, will cause federal spending to jump by half, from 20 percent of the economy to 30 percent by 2035. This tsunami of spending is a major threat to limited government because it runs on auto-pilot with automatic increases locked in by each program’s governing laws. While other programs are constrained through annual budgets, entitlements get first call on resources. Other goals such as defense or national security must compete for an increasingly smaller share of what’s left. This ‘locked in’ spending is steadily undermining the economic future of younger generations, who face a debt burden of $175,000 per person. The moral and ethical challenge from the entitlement tsunami is undermining our democratic system as more Americans become dependent on the government and other priorities are automatically pre-empted.” Continued...